‘Reality Awaits’ review: The Strokes glitch their own myth

The Strokes’ seventh album, Reality Awaits, is smart enough to justify its worst decisions. If only it didn’t keep making them.

Johann Rashid built the Reality Awaits sleeve out of Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), and anyone who skips past that fact will misread the entire album. Prince made his cowboy by photographing a Marlboro ad and cropping out the branding. The result looks like the last honest man in America. It’s actually, in fact, a secondhand image of a hired model selling a carcinogen. Prince’s whole point: the icon of the unmediated self came to us pre-processed. And we loved it more for the processing.

Hold that thought through the next 42 minutes, because The Strokes have lived inside the same joke since 2001. Critics greeted Is This It as the return of unvarnished rock and roll while the band assembled its silhouette from Television, the Velvet Underground, and a Lower East Side that already understood how photographs work. Julian Casablancas sang through a distorted mic and a compressor stack, and a generation heard his sincerity through his walls.

So Casablancas spends album seven doing to his voice what Prince did to the Marlboro Man. He rephotographs it. He runs a famously human instrument — that hungover, half-swallowed croon — through pitch correction until it sounds like a quotation of itself. The band announced the record through a vintage Nissan 300ZX ad. They released In Transit: Part II, a sequel to their own 2001 tour documentary, filmed 25 years later in Costa Rica with Rick Rubin. Every gesture in this campaign points the same direction. Here is a band photographing a photograph of itself.

The concept? Great. The execution? Frayed, at best.

The Auto-Tune argues with itself.

The vocal processing accomplishes plenty when it works. “Liar’s Remorse” places a line about obeying an AI’s daily instructions inside a chorus that a machine has already smoothed. So the delivery performs the surrender the lyric describes. “Falling Out of Love” ends with Casablancas dissolving into digital shimmer at exactly the moment the song admits the relationship is over. The man evaporates as the feeling does. That kind of rhyme between subject and surface represents real craft.

Then the same effect appears on track two. And track three. Then track six. Then the closer.

Here lies the album’s central failure, and it operates as a math problem rather than a taste problem. An effect that means something on three songs means considerably less on nine. Saturation converts even the best arguments into wallpaper. By “The Fruits of Conquest,” the processing has stopped signifying anything beyond the fact that Casablancas enjoys it, which leaves listeners to evaluate the sound purely as sound. And as sound, applied to a baritone this specific, it flattens the grain that made him worth mythologizing.

Compare the strategy to a filmmaker who shoots one scene through a security camera to make a point about surveillance, then shoots the whole movie that way. The point survives about eleven minutes. Everything after becomes a stylistic tic wearing the costume of an idea.

The band underneath, meanwhile, plays like it has something to prove. Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. spend the record trading tightly interlocked figures. Fabrizio Moretti and Nikolai Fraiture push grooves with genuine snap. Their commitment makes the vocal decision hurt more.

“Reality Awaits” for no one.

Despite only being nine songs, the album somehow feels longer than it is. Maybe the tracklist explains why. Is This It moved eleven songs through roughly 36 minutes — an average near three minutes and fifteen seconds. Reality Awaits moves nine songs through 41, averaging about four and a half. The Strokes built their reputation up to this point on compression: enter, hook, exit, repeat. This album lets songs sprawl into crescendos and outro vignettes, and it opens with two of its longest, strangest tracks back to back.

“Psycho Shit,” for examples, spends most of its runtime climbing toward a release it withholds until the final stretch. “Dine N’Dash” follows with British-accented spoken word, tempo shifts, and a chorus that shimmers in a completely different decade than its verses. A listener showing up for hooks endures nine or ten minutes before the record offers a single one.

That sequencing choice reads as deliberate, of course. As a filter placed at the entrance. It also costs the album its most reliable historical asset. Sequencing communicates intent, and this order tells casual listeners to get on out of here.

Three birds and a proverb.

The album opens with Casablancas comparing himself to a bird of prey, talons flashing in sunlight, appealing only from a safe distance. It closes on the final image of “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon”: a black bird with red eyes, flying home. Between those two points sits “Dine N’Dash,” where a wise man’s proverb comes back mangled — birds of a feather, in this telling, die together.

Read the three in order and the record’s actual arc appears. Predator, corrupted wisdom, homecoming. The album travels from a man who describes himself through his weapons, through a moment where inherited language fails him, to an animal returning at dusk. Casablancas flags the corruption himself by admitting he mistook the words. He knows he has the saying wrong. He keeps it wrong, because the mistake carries the meaning: solidarity as mutual destruction.

“Going Shopping” completes the pattern by turning the predator into a critic. The tigers in that song hunt with words in place of claws, seducing prey toward the point where it consents to the mauling. Set that beside “Lonely in the Future,” where Casablancas names Anthony Fantano directly, and the album’s animal imagery resolves into something specific: an artist who spent 25 years watching language eat people.

The best writing on the album.

“Liar’s Remores” builds its chorus as a closed syllogism — love requires pain, pain requires trust, trust requires love — and loops it until the logic swallows its own tail. Circular reasoning as a chorus, which suits a band whose defining early move was the two-bar figure that returns forever.

Listen to all three passes, though. The verbs migrate. Early on, the chorus tracks what this person has, and the emptiness comes off as circumstance. By the final pass, the same lines track what this person wants, and the emptiness feels like appetite. The construction slides from deprivation to volition, from a condition life imposed to a choice a coward makes. Casablancas alters maybe four words across three repetitions and converts a lament into an indictment.

I would rank that among the sharpest formal ideas in the band’s catalog, and it shows up smuggled inside a chorus most listeners will absorb as a mood. The guitar break — Valensi and Hammond bending pedals until the tone approximates a mariachi trumpet — earns the same admiration, right up to the moment Casablancas announces “harmonic minor” over the top of it and punctures his own achievement. Roughly half the album works this way: a sincere idea, followed by the singer knocking it over.

The politics live in the metaphor rather than the slogans.

Casablancas closed The Strokes’ 2026 Coachella set with a montage indicting decades of CIA-backed regime change, then walked offstage while it played. So it’s easy to call this album’s politics cryptic by comparison. But perhaps we’re examining the wrong layer.

Consider the title of the album’s second song. Dining and dashing describes consumption that skips the bill. Now consider what the record surrounds that phrase with: a track literally titled “The Fruits of Conquest,” in which the narrator chants that he functions as a leech; a shopping anthem where the singer describes building future ruins and constructing castles from dead trees. The album’s political argument just might sit inside a single sustained metaphor: empire as an unpaid check, a civilization eating a meal it plans to walk out on.

“Dine N’Dash” then stages the personal cost in one stanza. The narrator fantasizes about torturing an enemy in graphic detail, stops, and confronts his own vow of peace. He asks how he might reconcile the beast. The song places that crisis directly beside a chorus about petty theft, which tells you the two operate on the same continuum. Casablancas has made his most coherent political statement by refusing to argue and building a metaphor instead.

Where the record loses me.

“The Fruits of Conquest” wastes the album’s most promising groove on a children’s-television delivery and sixteen repetitions of a single line. “Psycho Shit” earns its climax and then spends four minutes reaching it.

And “Lonely in the Future,” musically the most immediate song in Reality Awaits, houses its most self-defeating idea: a man who spent the album diagnosing how criticism devours artists chooses to punch back at a YouTube reviewer, which converts a diagnosis into a grudge.

The generosity of “Going to Babble On” makes the contrast plain. There, Casablancas mocks his own sense of persecution — one line insists that the listener’s struggle exceeds everyone else’s, and he sings it with obvious irony. He understands the trap. He walks into it anyway, three songs later.

The bottom line.

Reality Awaits deserves defenders, and those defenders will get better at defending it. Its thematic architecture surpasses anything The Strokes have attempted, at least in theory. Its final minutes, as the record accepts that all songs must end, hits with real grace. Rubin’s Costa Rica sessions caught four musicians playing with hunger.

They also caught a frontman who mistook a great idea for a rule. Pitch correction as commentary works brilliantly across three songs and evaporates across nine, and the album’s strongest passages — the syllogism drift of “Liar’s Remorse,” the bird triptych, the empire-as-dine-and-dash conceit — sit underneath a treatment that keeps listeners from finding them.

Call it the most interesting album The Strokes have made since 2003 and their fourth or fifth best. Both statements can be true, as the man says.

‘Reality Awaits’ is available now. 

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Images courtesy of Cult Records.